@alex Interesting. I didn't know all of this.

I frankly believe that a single website to view trends, or perhaps work as an API, would be the best option. I feel like a script that reads all the toots in the timeline should be able to scan the hashtags and sort them fairly quickly. Right? Shouldn't be too hard to do in #JavaScript.

@realcaseyrollins For each new tashtag it discovers, it will get slower to sort the entire list. Also, what’s the cutoff point? We have to store a date with each hashtag too, and we want to count occurrences of that tag from today but not occurrences of that tag from yesterday. Sorting them and pruning the old ones is too slow to happen every time someone loads the trending panel. So we need multiple layers of cache with background processes that automatically update them.

Mastodon just prunes it at 12am midnight UTC every day. So if you ever visit in the morning and there’s no trends, that’s why. It’s not from the past 24 hours, it’s trends since 12am UTC.

@alex Ahhh I see. I was thinking it should remake the list of hashtags every time it refreshes and only look at the posts from the past 48-72 hours...I'm not sure why it would be important to store hashtags that haven't been used in a month if the point is to see what's trending right at the moment.

@realcaseyrollins In theory this is what we want to happen, it’s just a slow operation. You can either run a background task to keep crunching it and update the cache automatically, or manipulate cached counter how Mastodon does it. There are pros and cons to each way but neither is ideal.

@alex A friend of mine who's no longer on the fedi made a page like that, he gave me the code so I could look at it. It worked pretty well, there was even the potential to see the local trends of every single instance. The only issue is, it included bot posts.

Unfortunately the page isn't up anymore but I have the code still so I might be able to put it up somewhere when I get time

I think the #JavaScript code could even be used as an API if that would be preferable to having it built into every instance

@alex @realcaseyrollins 'trending tags' in twitter etc are heavily moderated. they are popular, but they are still a way to 'steer the crowd'. hashtags themselves aren't federated entities yet (they are kinda sorta literals) so it's hard to get a global views of them, so to make them anything useful, we'd have to moderate (that is, push) them, too. it's fine if that's what you want, suggest topics for people to follow. just never try to imagine that 'trending hashtags' are some kind of mindhive 'best of the best'.

@lain @realcaseyrollins Makes sense. In the case of Spinster I made trends local-only, and I think that brought some value, by makings tags like #bookclub easier to find (although we did also get #FreeSquiddy, which was not good).

There are probably better ways to increase discoverability. But I fear they will all have this problem of needing some manual curation.

@alex @realcaseyrollins i think with the fediverse's instance concept, curated tags aren't that bad (curation / restriction is kind of the reason you are on an instance anyway).

@lain @alex I really don't like the idea of curating trending hashtags, IMHO...I'd prefer it to just show what people are talking about. Local-only trends would be helpful for filtering things specific to the community tho

@realcaseyrollins @alex that usually doesn't work because people will game the system and just post a lot

@lain @alex Ain't that what antispam policies are for

@realcaseyrollins @alex it's just a really hard topic. you have to know what your goal is. usually, it's 'hey this is what people are talking about, maybe check it out'. it's easier to do this with curation than to rely on an automated system. otherwise, #animearmpits will always be extremely popular.

@lain @realcaseyrollins @alex Trends are waste of time and energy and do not work. Topics are good and work but you have to allow for the merging of Topics or, better yet, have admin approve Topics so no duplicates. eg. Covid and covid-19 and coronachan should not be 3 Topics (same problem with trends).

@derek @lain @alex I feel like an AI algorithm should be able to automatically lump #COVID with #COVID_19 by character similarity. I've done similar text matching in #Python before.

@realcaseyrollins @lain @alex way too complicated and have fun making that your full time job as every 17 year old tries to come up with new ways to break the AI.

@derek @lain @alex It really wouldn't be that hard to do

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10473745/compare-strings-javascript-return-of-likely

@derek @lain @alex Man y'all are literally motivating me to change my friend's code and make an API to prove y'all wrong. I'm 100% sure this can be done quite simply using #JavaScript

@derek @lain @alex I found this tho, it's very similar to what I'm thinking of making

https://fediverse.0qz.fun/

Just doesn't support local-only trends, or an API

@realcaseyrollins @lain @alex you can try it. i'm telling you Trends are effective in my experience, especially on an instance with a couple hundred or even thousand people. usually only people trying to game Trends will use # and ecelebs. For example, infowars posts about 20 times per day on one my sites, every post they use multiple hashtags #infowars #alexjones etc. after a few days of that they are Trending. they really aren't but the list shows they are so you have to moderate and ban those terms from trends then you are trying to censor them... gotta 2 steps ahead. believe me, user moderated Groups is all that is needed. And IMHO anything that tries to control the behavior of a user outside of those people they chose to follow directly is wrong. and yes, i also have following Trends, still a mess. I created about 10 categories, users can select up to 3 cats on each post. then people can only see cats they want to see. if you are sick of political topics you can hide them all. but ppl complain all that extra work of selecting a cat before posting...btw - it is very easy to do so on my sites.

@derek @lain @alex

> tries to control the behavior of the user

That's why I wouldn't want an admin moderating or censoring the trends. That feels like manipulation to me.

The key really is ignoring botposts, IMHO.

@realcaseyrollins @lain @alex lol. bots are problem but people are bigger problem. if you have trends you have to have moderation for trends.

@lnxw37a2 @alex @derek @lain Well I guess I could check for similarity between each post too, and if the posts are too similar they don't count? 🤔

@realcaseyrollins @lain @alex another option is categories. about 100 cats should suffice to break out posts into top level Topics. but honestly, Groups kind of covers both Topics and Trends in a better way, user moderated.

@derek @lain @alex Groups would be nice. It'd be cool to have trending groups, that would be easier to do. But it'd be nice to know what specifically is going on in those groups, rather than that they are just trending.

But maybe that's what clicking is for 😂

@derek @lain @alex @realcaseyrollins That's true, but its still better than not having trending.

@farhan @alex @lain @realcaseyrollins Trends is pointless. any system so easy to game is pointless and once you moderate one dumb trend a bunch of children make trend you are "censoring me!" Groups with user admin and mods does it all.

@lain @realcaseyrollins @alex Reminds me that this would happen on twitter too. Happened with GS, but then people got bored of it after a while. So the bots took over. I'm looking forward to groups instead, I think those will be better for interacting with people when it comes to interests. Will help to have a list of public groups to join. I found it more useful than trends.

@sim @alex @lain Ah. Trending groups would be nice!

@realcaseyrollins @alex @lain Wouldn't really need a trend. On GS classic, it worked that you had a list to choose from and you could search for a group in the search bar or check the newest groups out.

@sim @alex @lain What's GS btw?

@realcaseyrollins @alex @lain Shorthand for GNU Social. There used to be a classic interface and a qvitter one for it. The classic one had really cool features for groups and other things that never made it over to qvitter so I refer to that.

@sim @alex @lain What happened to that btw? Did people just get bored and tire of it?

@realcaseyrollins @alex @lain No... there were a lot of bugs with it and it had trouble being maintained because fewer people worked on it due to that.

Most of the instances using it have shut down or moved software. Like SPC started out with GS, and then moved to pleroma. I think there are still one or two instances using it, but since it uses ostatus and that isn't recognised by newer pleroma and mastodon, we won't see those if updated to the latest versions.

@sim @alex @lain Ah. That kinda sucks.

@sim @realcaseyrollins @alex @lain There are still dozens of instances using GS, and people still looking to open more.

@lnxw37a2 @alex @lain @sim The GS master race is real

@lnxw37a2 @alex @lain @realcaseyrollins There are? That's nice to hear! I thought the numbers were dwindling but it is nice to hear there are people opening more still.

@sim @alex @lain @realcaseyrollins Well, it wasn't too long ago that there were hundreds, so the numbers have dwindled considerably.

@realcaseyrollins @lain The top trends will always be #nsfw and #animearmpits thanks to dielan’s bots

@alex @lain 😂

I noticed that when using my friend's page. That's why bot posts shouldn't be counted in trends.

@realcaseyrollins @lain Ah so you mean it requires some manual curating? 😛

@realcaseyrollins @lain My idea at this point for trends in Pleroma is config options like “Trends are local-only” vs “Trends show everything and I accept the consequences” vs “Disabled”

@alex @lain Ahh that sounds good

@alex @lain 😂 Well it's manual, that's the opposite of automatic lol

@alex @lain @realcaseyrollins only bc squiddy called you out.....

@alex @lain @realcaseyrollins then again why did you banned her?

@11112011 @alex @lain @realcaseyrollins He has you muted but my guess is it was that the mod team hated dykes and it was entirely one-sided, and not a the natural result of the moderation demands required to run a site designed specifically to accommodate thousands of obnoxious catty bitches with rapidly disintegrating eggs.

@alex@gleasonator.com @lain@lain.com @realcaseyrollins@gameliberty.club i'm not sure how misskey handles trend.
it looks like its just locally keeping track of it based on what it happens to see.

still not sure about these 'Relays' .
i suppose they are for helping out with federation or something but i don't know of any to add.

its like a discovery tool that also needs to be discovered itself.

@lain @realcaseyrollins I wish I’d read this blog post sooner: https://blog.soykaf.com/post/postgresql-elixir-troubles/

Lots of info about querying hashtags. Also makes me wonder about the Flake ID migration issue… maybe I’ll write a blog post if I ever figure out why. 😆

@alex @lain @realcaseyrollins I love this writing style, that efficiently provides both humor and education on normally inaccessible topics

@alex @realcaseyrollins Sounds like a good case for adding an InfluxDB instance into the mix (it supports adding metrics to shards that expire after a set amount of time)

@realcaseyrollins @alex There are a few fediverse monitoring sites that do that kind of scraping.

@djsumdog @alex Ooh! Can you provide links? I'd love to see em.

@realcaseyrollins @alex

https://fediverse.network/

There was another database I used, but I can't seem to find it in my notes.

@djsumdog @alex Ah. That doesn't track trends tho

@realcaseyrollins @alex Yea I guess not. I'm not sure if there are any sites that do.

@alex @realcaseyrollins Every instance with trending hashtags just ends up showing a ton of bots and porn, nobody uses them.